Content provided in partnership with

Popper's return engagement: The open society in an era of globalization

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Neil McInnes

<< Page 1 Continued from page 6. Previous | Next

A similar falsification of the past has been inflicted on the Australian aborigenes, American Indians and most other peoples whose traditional society has been irreparably damaged by Western conquest. To please the culture cult they are condemned to stay in the wreckage of their old closed society--defined as "traditional"--rather than seek improvement in the open society around them--castigated as a type of imperialism or colonialism. One consequence is that the grandchildren of men and women who could and did read books in English are today illiterate, both in English and in their "native" tongues. Academic anthropologists are content to see them remain illiterate, as well as unemployable, sick and drunk, rather than risk having them lose the tatters of their old culture in the new.

Most Popular Articles in Business: Research and Markets : Tesco Plc - SWOT Framework Analysis; Do Us a Flavor - Ben & Jerry's Issues a Call for Euphoric New Flavors; eBay made easy: ready to start an eBay business? These 5 simple steps will ...; Katrina's lawsuit surge: a legal battle to force insurers to pay for flood ...; Wal-Mart's newest distribution center opened last month near the southwest ...; More »

This story of the contemporary glorification of the closed society does not take us far from Popper, for in recent times we have learned a lot about the conditions in which he lived as he wrote The Open Society and its Enemies. (9) He spent several years in bitter contention with the head of his department at the university in Christchurch, an anthropologist named Ivan Sutherland (1897-1952). Sutherland wrote in praise of Maori society and had the delusion that he could actually join a Maori tribe and be accepted into its culture. He pursued this delusion until he began to lose his reason, and took his own life. Thus, the contest of the closed and the open society was not for Popper, as it was for most of his readers, a bookish matter, but an issue of flesh and blood, a painful daily struggle of intellect against unreason.

IT WAS SO, too, for another reason. Most people outside the culture cult have an attachment to the open society that is no more urgent or present in mind than their support of motherhood. Not so Popper. He was dedicated to the ideal of the open society with a rare passion, with an enthusiasm and a breadth of vision that often still shock his disciples. They shock his biographer, for one. Hacohen is so dismayed by the extent of openness that Popper envisages for society that he sets out on the task (curious in a biographer) of rescuing his subject from his dearest beliefs, in the name of causes that Popper would have dismissed as merely sectional and limiting.

Popper envisaged that in graduating to the open society; men would ultimately shed all of the old, partisan allegiances, especially nationalism and confessional-ism, as he himself had done in leaving his native land and in denying all connection with the Jewish faith of his ancestors. "Racial pride", he declaimed, "is not only stupid but wrong, even if provoked by racial hatred. All nationalism or racialism is evil, and Jewish nationalism is no exception." His uncompromising cosmopolitanism and his resolute secularism, writes Hacohen, "left Popper a permanent exile, a citizen only in an imaginary Republic of Science.... Discounting all national, ethnic and religious identity as culturally primitive and politically reactionary, Popper posited a universalist vision of the scientific community and the Open Society where none of them counted."

Popper's return engagement: The open society in an era of globalization

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Neil McInnes

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Business

Most Popular Publications in Business